Convore - group chat for everyone

I've got a new company and a new product, Convore. Convore is the somewhat indirect result of my thinking on group chat for the past few years.

About two years ago I was using IRC almost every day to communicate at work and with friends. For the 2009 Django Dash, I helped design and build a web-based IRC client called Leafy Chat with Alex Gaynor and Chris Wanstrath. Soon after building the IRC-based Leafy Chat, it started to bother me that IRC was so complicated and nerdy. Even with the Leafy Chat web client, I kept mulling over how much the experience could be improved.

After building a few initial prototypes of non-IRC group chat apps, I got to talking with another Django developer, Eric Florenzano, about group collaboration. Eric was really interested in forums and the idea of topic-based conversations. We ended up combining the IRC-style group chat with the added topic structure of forums created a prototype, nicknamed Podium.

With our initial prototype we recruited a couple of our friends try it out. Within a month of testing we were sold on the concept. We recruited our third co-founder and designer, Eric Maguire, and were accepted to Y Combinator for their Winter 2011 session.

Just last Wednesday we launched Convore and the end of this story is that I think we've built something really cool and totally new and exciting.

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Convore - group chat for everyone

I've got a new company and a new product, Convore. Convore is the somewhat indirect result of my thinking on group chat for the past few years.

About two years ago I was using IRC almost every day to communicate at work and with friends. For the 2009 Django Dash, I helped design and build a web-based IRC client called Leafy Chat with Alex Gaynor and Chris Wanstrath. Soon after building the IRC-based Leafy Chat, it started to bother me that IRC was so complicated and nerdy. Even with the Leafy Chat web client, I kept mulling over how much the experience could be improved.

After building a few initial prototypes of non-IRC group chat apps, I got to talking with another Django developer, Eric Florenzano, about group collaboration. Eric was really interested in forums and the idea of topic-based conversations. We ended up combining the IRC-style group chat with the added topic structure of forums created a prototype, nicknamed Podium.

With our initial prototype we recruited a couple of our friends try it out. Within a month of testing we were sold on the concept. We recruited our third co-founder and designer, Eric Maguire, and were accepted to Y Combinator for their Winter 2011 session.

Just last Wednesday we launched Convore and the end of this story is that I think we've built something really cool and totally new and exciting.